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Kyle Bass: Financier, Or Wall Street Poker Player?

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of difference between making a career as an investor, and a gambler, except for social regard. At least, that seems to be the case with Kyle Bass, who has done some exceptionally questionable things during his career. Starting at the beginning, he used to work for Bear-Stearns. When he was no longer employed with them, he went and dropped a tip to a journalist. That tip fell on a Monday morning broadcast. By the end of the week, Bear-Stearns had lost so much financier confidence, they had to be bought out by J.P. Morgan-Chase. By the end of that year, 2008, the Great Recession was making international waves. Meanwhile, Bass short-sold sub-prime loans and made a fortune, simultaneously accruing celebrity and a media platform that he has not been loathe to capitalize on.

The next spurious moment in Bass’ career comes from his creation of CAD, the Coalition for Affordable Drugs. Useful Stooges originally reported on this in Kyle Bass The Frantic Investments of a Desperate Gambler. This organization uses legal petition, lawsuits, and legislative putsches to force price drops on the part of big-ticket pharmaceuticals. This in turn drops their stock. Bass then short-sells his holdings and makes a pretty penny. Meanwhile, the pharmaceuticals have to cut costs which don’t quantitatively bring returns, and that means departments like Research and Development become indefinitely suspended, simultaneously curtailing breakthroughs on the cusp of discovery.

Finally, Bass is regularly involved with and supportive of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a socialist despot of a woman who has such a terrible time economically maintaining her country that it has defaulted twice in only thirteen years.

Bass contemporarily has said a number of things against China, intimating their collapse from debt-bubble expansion will hit by the end of 2016 with a forty to fifty percent likelihood, and definitely within “the next two to three years”. He’s also said that material currency devaluation would make Asian investment especially good. It sounds like previously he was trying to turn investors away from China, realized this wasn’t as good for the investments he’s made as he thought it was, and is now trying to back-pedal with grace. That’s just like betting on the flop, and realizing the pocket aces in-hand will likely be trumped by a full-house.